The five top “care-abouts” on wafer-level packaging (WLP) production lines are the following: on-wafer performance, reliability, wafer protection, extendibility/flexibility, and productivity. These respectively translate into high plating rates while maintaining excellent uniformity and co-planarity; maximum system uptime with minimal operator intervention; damage-free processing of high-revenue wafers; rapid, in-fab reconfiguration for multiple metals, products, and production capacities; and maximum output at the lowest cost of operation.

As the accompanying chart illustrates, the Applied Nokota™ ECD system for WLP delivers all five of these value elements, offering users ultimate wafer protection and market-leading productivity. Key to its benchmark performance are VMax™ plating chambers, SafeSeal™ wafer assemblies, HotSwap™ mechanism, a modular system design incorporating high-reliability components and enabling rapid plating sequence and capacity changes. The data points on the chart highlight their combined effects and demonstrate why the Nokota is the industry’s best value in WLP.

In my next blog, I’ll go into greater detail about each of these key features.

New facility will offer the industry’s most advanced R&D environment for working with the extended semiconductor ecosystem to accelerate readiness of new materials, methods and devices for computing applications including Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.